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Review: Fiction: The Voices by Susan Elderkin

THE VOICESby Susan ElderkinFourth Estate £16.99 pp323 Susan Elderkin’s second novel, a long, ambitious saga of spirits, aboriginal people and poor whites in Australia, is published within a few months of her being chosen as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. The first thing to say is that as a writer she is the real thing, and the novel, tender, sensual and genuinely original, for the most part stands up well to expectations. The second thing to say is that The Voices should have been edited down to two-thirds its size; the narrative is slow and circuitous, and I sometimes flagged, but each time Elderkin’s inventiveness and energy wooed me back.

The title has a disembodied ring to it, and Elderkin takes great risks, in these tacky materialistic times, by invoking a “we” chorus of ancestral spirits, who argue with another speaking character, the wind. However,